You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
‘It's nice to think somebody's listening to me instead of saying “oh shut up”’
Julie, who has Lewy Body Dementia, is making an appeal for her experience to be received as something that can still take form in another mind. Her words may be echoed by many others who have disabling long-term health conditions and by many filial carers. They point to a minimal condition of representability: the presence of an addressee capable of holding experience so it exists as more than noise — something that can be addressed, returned, and borne in shared psychic space of the relational field.
Psychoanalytic field theorists treat representability less as an individual achievement than as an emergent capacity of the relational–affective field (Civitarese & Ferro, 2022). It is registered in aesthetic shifts in tone, cadence, and atmosphere through which experience begins, or fails, to take shape (Civitarese, 2020; Civitarese, 2022). Where representability1 holds, experience can find an address and return in modified form; where it loosens, experience tends to accumulate without reply. Recognisability—the capacity to appear, to self and other, as an addressable person—is an effect of representability, not a separate faculty. In doing so, it supports a livable ego ideal2: a shared form of self-regard held open in the field. When relational return weakens, that position becomes harder to inhabit.
This paper contributes to a developing body of applied psychoanalytic work on long-term health conditions, frailty, and dependency across the lifespan, with particular attention to later life and dementia (Briggs et al., 2022; Evans et al., 2020). Dependency is often approached through the dominant paradigms of dyadic complementarity—Benjamin's ‘doer/done-to’ formation (Benjamin, 2004), burden frameworks that quantify caregiving strain and its consequences (Zarit, 1980), or analyses of culturally shaped caregiving values at the societal level (McCarthy et al., 2025). Howe